1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to technology for easily and efficiently referencing hyperlinks within a current structured document or between it and other structured documents while, for example, the current structured document is being displayed or edited.
In the present invention, “structured document” means electronic document information that has been structuralized based upon predetermined structural elements, and described in languages such as SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879:1986) and XML (extensible Markup Language, W3C recommendation).
A “resource,” furthermore, indicates a denotable unit of information or services assigned to a link. All or an arbitrary portion of a structured document or non-structured document can be a resource. Specific examples of resources include files containing text data and image data, pictures, text documents, programs, and query results.
“Non-structured document” means electronic document information that has not been structuralized, such as standard text data, image data, and bitmap data.
“Linking” signifies the interrelating of a plurality of resources. By actuating the applicable place within the resources of a link source—for example, by selecting a word and double-clicking that selection with a mouse—a user can traverse (“jump”) to the linked resource. The “displayability” of a structured document signifies the ability of the contents of a structured document described in accordance with standards such as the above-noted SGML and XML to be output visually.
2. Description of Related Art
With the rapid growth of the Internet in recent years, it has become possible to refer to various types of information easily by linking different information to a single web page. Information linked to other information is displayed using different font colors, underlining, bordering, or the like, to distinguish it from information that is not linked to other information. Of these display methods, FIG. 13 shows an example wherein underlining is used in the display. The user is able to recognize the presence of a link from the underlining and can call up the linked resource by actuating that place.
However, even if the user can recognize the presence of a link to other information in a document being displayed, the user cannot tell, for example, what kind of information is at the linked resource, what the relationship between the linked items is, without actually displaying the linked resource. Also, the user cannot know whether the information at the linked resource actually exists. Furthermore, wherein a link destination refers to a document in part, the user cannot confirm what section of the link destination document is being referenced and cannot be edited, nor which sections, not being referenced, are passages in the original that can be edited.
Also, while users can easily create a wide variety of links, this also means that it is easy to link any information to third parties' web pages. In such cases, before referring to—i.e., “going/jumping to”—the linked information, the user cannot know information such as where the link destination is and who the author of the linked information is. Furthermore, in cases of reusing linked resource information, problems may arise with linked information copyrights. However, the existence of copyrights or trademarks on the linked information is not indicated to the user until the user goes to the link destination.
Furthermore, referring to linked information requires performing operations such as clicking a mouse each time. Thus, referring to linked information takes time and reaching desired information can be time-consuming.